Perception of textbook material by dyslectic and non-dyslectic students: an eye-tracking experiment

A textbook of English is one of the tools used by both teachers and students in the process of teaching/learning the language on the lessons of English at Polish (upper) secondary schools. Owing to the big variety of such textbooks on the market every teacher can choose the one that will comply with different criteria and will meet teacher’s and students’ expectations. It is also a fact that the students are not homogenous – the differences appear not only on personality, social, intellectual levels etc. but also on the level of different specifi c diffi culties in the process of learning, often resulting from the students’ special educational needs. All these diverse students use the same (glotto)didactic materials although their perception abilities may be different. That is the reason for asking about the infl uence of the layout of the textbooks and workbooks of English on the way the students work with that type of (glotto)didactic materials. To find the answer to the above problem the eye-tracking methods were used – a textbook and workbook examples were checked on a group of (upper)secondary school students. In the experiments the students represented two groups of (upper)secondary school students – dyslectic and non-dyslectic ones. The aim of the study was to compare the way the students work with the textbook material, show tendencies in their way of doing it and check if there are any significant differences between dyslectic and non-dyslectic students dealing with the particular English textbook examples.